Julia Shaw is an expert on crime and evil.
To Shaw, crime is real.
Evil? Not so much.
In 2020, Shaw wrote a book titled – Evil: The Science Behind Humanity’s Dark Side (Abrams, 2020) – in which she argues that evil is largely subjective. What one may consider normal, like sex before marriage, eating meat, or working on Wall Street, others find abhorrent.
Shaw asks – if evil is only in the eye of the beholder, can it be said to exist at all?
Now, Shaw is out with a new book titled – Green Crime: Inside the Minds of the People Destroying the Planet, and How to Stop Them (Chelsea Green, 2025).
And unlike evil, green crime exists. Our planet is a crime scene, Shaw says. People are murdered, ecosystems are destroyed, and corruption is rampant.
In Green Crime, Shaw, a criminal psychologist, takes us inside six environmental crimes and reveals how the perpetrators think, why their crimes are so deadly, and how we can stop them from damaging our planet and our future.
Shaw explores six pillars of criminal behavior – ease, impunity, greed, rationalization, conformity, and desperation.
She applies the six pillars to six green crimes – the Volkswagen emissions scandal (Dieselgate), the murder of Brazilian rainforest activists Zé Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva and his wife, Maria, illegal poaching for ivory by the Shuidong Syndicate, the world’s longest ship chase, tracking down illegal fishing ship Thunder, Operation Vala Umgodi (Close the Hole) fighting illegal mining in South Africa and the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion and spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
A key theme in your book is we should start treating environmental criminals the way we treat regular criminals, as we treat murderers. But you would not consider destroying the earth as evil?
“No. We need to deconstruct evil,” Shaw told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last week. “It creates monsters. People have said to me – I did sort of consider these people greedy fat cats sitting on a pile of money with the planet burning beneath them. There is this sweeping idea that people at the head of corporations are these evil masterminds or people who don’t care at all about the planet. Neither of those are true.”
“By looking at the real humans involved it can make them more understandable. I don’t see it as the ultimate evil. Using that kind of language makes it harder for us to fight against it. And it makes the villains or the people we are trying stop seem either subhuman or more than human – both are bad.”
“We have a criminal justice framework that we can apply to these environmental issues and the companies and individuals who are destroying it. An Interpol agent told me that sometimes you can prosecute people for environmental offenses with various environmental laws. But you can also apply other areas of law. He was explaining that quite often you can get people for fraud, document fraud, or you might have money laundering. You might have all kinds of other laws that are being broken at the same time.”
You go into a bit of detail on how the VW dieselgate crime came to light.
“I spoke with Alberto Ayala, an emissions regulator who at the time was working for the California Air Resources Board. He was trying to figure out how Volkswagen was getting such incredibly good emissions ratings. He said they started to look at these cars because they were also so good. Regulators are often portrayed as the enemy, as people who are just trying to get in the way. But Ayala was really impressed with the VW results. And he said – show me how you are doing this? And they couldn’t.”
“He started to realize that something was wrong. He kept asking for more information and more data. And it still didn’t add up. At some point he realized they had been lying to him for years. That’s when the FBI investigation started. It took ages for them to figure out exactly how VW cheated and how they implemented what they called this defeat device. It’s still unclear who came up with it. I don’t think that was ever clear. There seemed to be lots of people involved.”
“There was a level of lying within the organization and lying to the public. When it all came out, he said he would return to these conferences and at one of these conferences, VW people would come up to him and shake his hand and thank him for stopping this fraud.”
“In these corporations, you have people who will get sucked into these crimes – people who don’t want to participate in them. But they don’t understand how they can get out of it. It ended up being a combination of conformity, feeling like everyone is doing it, the pressure. They ask – Am I really going to be the whistleblower and put my job or my career on the line? So, you have these people who are stuck in place. By having someone from the outside coming in and saying – you can’t do this, this is illegal – that can actually free quite a number of people within the organization from those shackles. He was saying that people were coming up and shaking his hand and thanking him. And that surprised him.”
Shaking the hand of your prosecutor or regulator is not a hallmark of evil. For each one of these crimes you identify six pillars – ease, impunity, greed, rationalization, conformity and desperation. Some of these are more applicable to organized crime, street crime, gang kinds of crimes. But others apply to corporate crime. Desperation doesn’t ring true for corporate crime.
“Yes it does,” Shaw says. “Desperation just means something different for corporate crimes. The six pillars apply to every case I looked at, regardless of setting. They didn’t apply at each level to each individual but they did apply to each case. Initially, I tried to find a case that applied to one of the pillars – a case that revolved around ease, or a case that revolved around desperation. But that didn’t work because they all applied to all of them.”
“Desperation in corporate crime settings refers to people feeling like they don’t have an out. That doesn’t mean it’s true in a purely objective sense. It just means that people feel that if I lose my job, I’m not going to get another one. And desperation can also mean the fear of prison. People will say – I’m in it now, what am I going to do. I’m going to keep lying or I’m going to do what my boss says because I’ve been backed into a corner.”
“The New York Times reporter Jack Ewing spoke with the individuals involved in the dieselgate case at the time it was happening. He said that many of them were trying to convince him that they were good people. But they were also using this language – I had to, I couldn’t not.”
“And you see that reflected in the trials – I was following orders, I had no other choice. And that is desperation. So absolutely, desperation can play a role in corporate crimes. It just looks very different from the absolute poverty you see in poaching cases.”
You make a distinction between corporate crime and violent crime. But of course corporate crime is often violent crime. But it’s not seen that way. Why is that the case?
“There is something called slow violence, where the slow degradation of an ecosphere can affect local people. But I wouldn’t necessarily call it violence. It’s a crime.”
Eleven workers did die in the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion and the company was charged and convicted of federal manslaughter. And hundreds of passengers died in the Boeing crashes. And that was a crime. Whether you call it violent crime or not, deaths result from those crimes. And we have reported on studies showing that more people die from corporate crime than from all street crimes combined. It is violent in that sense.
“I have quite a limited definition of violence. You are right, in the Deepwater Horizon case there was a corporate manslaughter guilty plea. And that is violence. But it’s rare that it is quite so direct to link it to corporate crime. I don’t think we should assign violent crime a superior status over other crimes that pose existential threats. That’s an error that we make – that violent crime is the most important crime. I just don’t think that’s true. Removing some of that language from these cases can be quite useful.”
“We should be talking about these green crimes in the same context of these violent crimes. But we shouldn’t be equating them as the same. In some ways, these crimes against the environment are way worse than some violent crimes. They are existential crimes. They affect a huge number of people.”
You open your book with this line: “Never have I felt more hopeful about the earth’s future than after diving into some of the world’s worst environmental crimes.”
What did you mean?
“I spoke with the regulators who cracked the Volkswagen case, with the scientists doing research on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the people who discovered that officials were severely underestimating the amount of oil that was coming out of the well – by meeting Interpol agents and undercover agents who infiltrate these organized crime groups, the human rights lawyers and environmental lawyers who are cracking down on these crimes. These are what criminologists call capable guardians – by meeting these capable guardians, I felt as if there were a whole army of people who are fighting for the earth. And I didn’t realize that they existed before I started research for this book.”
“And I wanted to bring these heroes into the foreground. I tell each story through the eyes of the investigators. And that’s not a perspective we often get. And because of the cases I selected, most of them have what I would call happy endings. I want to let the public know there are heroes in these cases. And for me, I felt supported by this army of people who are fighting on my side.”
You rarely come across academics like yourself who dive into the details of corporate crime and try to make it relatable to a larger public. Why is that?
“I was interested in using a true crime format, which is something that I do with the BBC and with the TV and podcast programs that I host. You start with a crime scene, you figure out who did it and then you try to understand what the consequences are. I try to keep it as exciting as possible so that people want to learn about the case.”
“For me it was really important to at least try to create engaging stories that can grip people, regardless of whether they were interested in environmental issues beforehand. I try to harness the whole range of human emotions in each chapter.”
“But yes, books on environmental issues can be very specific. You can have a whole book on just one case. Or you have a whole book on one issue like environmental law. That is not going to draw in many people.”
Is this book being made into a television series?
“Not that I know of yet, but it will only come out in the United States in two weeks. I do think it would make a great television show. It’s difficult to convince people that environmental crimes aren’t going to be boring and aren’t going to make people feel guilty. This book is not about individual responsibility for environmental crimes. I think that’s mostly misdirection from the real issues. The way in which environmental issues have been framed as based on personal responsibility is problematic.”
If individuals within these corporations did the right thing, these crimes would not have occurred. So what do you mean by individual responsibility?
“Yes, that’s right. But I was talking about the way we are told it is the consumer’s responsibility. I grew up hearing – reduce, reuse, recycle rhetoric. It’s not that it’s irrelevant, but it’s never going to have the impact of the organizations themselves reducing the waste they create, or not polluting rivers, or not engaging in emissions fraud. That’s what I mean that we have been sold a lie of individual responsibility.”
“But I also want to profile the individuals within the corporations or the organized crime settings – the people involved in those decisions. Those are flesh and blood people who can be prosecuted. And we can also prosecute the organizations, of course. We can prosecute them. We can stop them. We can intervene. And we can prevent them from making bad decisions in the future.”
What’s your next project?
“I’m interested in why people do bad things and prison reform. I’m going to be looking at prisons and the psychology within prisons. And more importantly punitive attitudes. We have to be careful not to overdo it. The tough on crime approach to environmental crime doesn’t serve us very well. You can start putting lots of people in prison. And the question becomes – are they the right people? In the UK and US, prisons are quite crowded and they are problematic from a human rights perspective and they don’t seem to be making society any safer. And the question is raised – why do we keep putting people in prison?”
[For the complete q/a format Interview with Julia Shaw, see 39 Corporate Crime Reporter 43(12), November 10, 2025, print edition only.]